The wall has to be purple. It doesn’t really feel like it’s my space- the space that will hold me most comfortably- unless the wall is purple. Painting that wall was the first thing I did when I moved into my apartment. And the second was figuring out where to put my books. My life, looked at through the lens of my bedroom, is largely comprised by a combination of crafts and books. Crochet hooks rest on my night-stand and where you expect to find pens in a cup. Canvases stack up under my bed; spools of thread and skeins of yarn squish their way into a drawer or between books. These books are barely organized by topic and relate to both my Jewish interests and secular interests. The Jewish Study Bible rests next to Cutting For Stone, while The History of Love sits on my night-stand, merging my interests of great fiction with Judaism. The full set of Shulchan Arukh rests on my loft. I stare at it as I fall asleep and struggle over its place in my life.And my room, unfortunately, is usually not very tidy. There’s no filth, but there’s always a bit of clutter. I sometimes think this physical state of my room parallels what my life looks like. I often feel pulled in many directions, thinking about work, school, friends at the same time and unable to totally get everything in order.My room is the only space in my tiny, shared UWS apartment that is really mine, so most of what’s important to me is packed into that room. The four-picture frame above my bed tells that story: a picture of me with my aging Holocaust-survivor grandfather, beautiful roses from a garden in Jerusalem, three dear friends with me, and my three siblings with me.